While Fedora is a popular desktop Linux distro, one of its primary purposes is to test out new technologies for use in future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As part of this testing agenda, a future replacement for YUM known as DNF has been available in the Fedora repos since Fedora 18.

DNF is planned to be fully implemented in Fedora 22, but for now the Fedora developers have called for public testing of the new package management system. DNF is a fork of YUM 3.4 and based upon Hawkey, another package manager coming to Fedora in the next release. To go with the call for testing, DNF has been updated to 0.4.10 with some minor bug fixes.

Whether or not DNF will make it into Fedora 22 in the way planned is yet to be seen – notoriously the btrfs development in Fedora has taken a long time. There’s still some time before we even see Fedora 22 though, and you can help make sure it gets in by testing it out now.